Last week, Apple unveiled their future at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference. There was much hoopla for all of Apple’s new technology, and saw everyone on stage repeatedly so thrilled and really excited to tell you all about the stuff that their energy drink fuelled all-weekers (all nighters are for wimps) will deliver in the coming months
But importantly for us DJs was the announcement of MacOS. Yes, OS X is dead (well… renamed at least), along with having to hear heathens refer to it as Oh Ess Ecks since day one. And with this announcement comes a beta, dubbed Sierra, available as of last week at the Apple Developer site. I know, because thanks to my lemming tendencies I have a developer account and routinely chuck shaky betas at my Apple hardware for shits and giggles. And do this in the full knowledge that my mission critical Adobe Premiere or Photoshop will no doubt choke. But I just don’t care — behold the field in which I grow my… well you know the rest.
So as of 15th June, you (the industry with developer accounts) have been able to install and check out if your latest and greatest, or for that matter oldest and dearest will play nice with the new spangly MacOS, or will throw a hissy fit and refuse to work at all.
As we have seen and suffered with El Capitan, there is every chance that said hissy fit will be thrown, especially as MacOS is likely to be more than just a rebadge with a few new tricks. The underlying OSes are converging, and there will be many hurdles to jump before it’s all one perfectly coherent blob of an OS. You need to be ahead of the curve.
BE PREPARED
So my message to the industry is this — I know you’re all at breaking point resource wise, but could you just go right ahead and grab the MacOS Sierra beta and give it a whirl with your stuff, that’d be great. I know it’s really not your fault, and were royally reamed by Apple with El Capitan. But we’ve been here many times before, and it’s time to learn something from the harsh lessons, or you are doomed to repeat them and piss off aka lose more loyal customers.
To be clear — nobody is expecting all the new features to be fully integrated from day one. I don’t expect to DJ Siri to be in full effect, or to have some complex Messages based request system up and running. We just want to be sure that we can install it, and our current DJ setup isn’t going to cry and rock in the corner muttering “it’s El Capitan all over again”.
More than anything, we’d like to know that the industry is looking into this ahead of time. Being kept informed (like Rane’s never ending battle with El Capitan) makes us feel much better about companies. My wife once schooled me on being late, and how the secret is communication. If I was going to be late, calling home to tell her is a better plan that not telling her at all and making her mad. So tell us what’s happening, rather than issuing a press release saying you’re not supporting MacOS just yet on the day MacOS is released.
SUMMING UP
Remember this — new customers are less likely if existing customers are unhappy. Word of mouth really does matter. And customer service when things go wrong is considerably more important than adding some new feature that just a handful of people might like. So sure up your foundations, do everything you can to make certain that your user base remains happy, and the rest will fall into place.
The MacOS beta is available to developers now, and a public beta is coming in July.